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The Different Types of Social Media

There is so much more to social media than meets the obvious platforms. Social media is a group of integrated Internet-based tools used to create, communicate, promote, and develop user interaction. With social media, user-generated content is the focus. So where does Internet marketing belong in this set-up?

With new-age Internet marketing strategies, everything is possible especially on advertising frontiers. Most social media platforms target individual users, but they also have options for companies, celebrities and other entities to join their networks.

In actuality, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are only the more popular tools of social media. When we really go dig deep into the industry, we’ll know soon enough that it’s a whole new world out there.

Social media can be classified into many categories and sub-categories. In fact, there is a present classification wheel for guidance that can be downloaded through the net. Without further ado, here are the top classifications of social media, as discussed by an SEO company in Turkey:

Social Networks

This type of social media is the most popular, and the most populous too. Included in this classification are the big-time players such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr. There are also more obscure social networks like Google+.

Social networking wasn’t really a thing on the past decade. In fact, the social network revolution only paved the way for more users to crowd the platforms today. The history of social networks was precedented by instant messaging tools. Direct chatting was the norm of Internet communication the time before social networks, and there are still applications that does the exact same thing until today.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is where social sites are annotated, bookmarked, earmarked and shared. There are no references on files on these sites, only bookmarks. Delicious.com popularized “social bookmarking”, and the purpose of these types of social media is to aggregate interesting content for end user consumption.

Aside from these types there are many still on the classification model for social media. Some of the lesser known types are microblogs, photosharing (with Instagram front and center), forums, blogs and business networks.